Why is noise so cool? Defying the stable mind's logical
resistance to entropy, the appeal of chaos in music is
clearly in its ability to polarize, to draw a line in the
air and dare listeners to jump over it. The quickest, most
explicit route to the elitist differentiation of hip is
popular rejection. Smelly cheese must be cool, since so
many people run from it. Gore-bottled Hong Kong action
flicks are cool. Ankle-busting high-heels are the coolest.
And so on.

And so it was with the avant-garde no wave wing of New
York City's punk scene in the late '70s. The small coterie
of bands (as institutionalized on Brian Eno's No New
York compilation, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Mars,
the Contortions and DNA) that formed a rebellion inside the
greater rebellion pulled like an undertow against the
hipster punk rock realm, instantly belittling into relative
mundanity those who had rejected mainstream music only to
accept its ingenious Bowery variants. The distance from
ELP's uber-technique to Talking Heads' tensed weirdness
telescoped to an inch when measured against Arto Lindsay's
frenzied guitar scrabblings and incomprehensible yelps. The
no wavers raised the admission fee to coolville by throwing
away all the rules, challenging the in crowd to make itself
inner. Song structure? Fuck all that reactionary bullshit.
Melody? Please! Who needs it? Lyrics of graspable
consequence? Think your own damn thoughts! 4/4 rock
drumming? Leave that for the retards unable to escape their
white-skin privilege and imperialist upbringing. Instead,
the no wave made with unrestricted id, pure expression of
the blurt, laying implicit claim to the supreme concept of
free jazz and the unassailable black groove cool of hard
funk.

Despite its minuscule recorded output, DNA, which
existed in two three-person lineups from roughly 1978 to
June 1982, was a major presence of startling originality.
DNA's genius and power were immediately evident when the
group contributed four cuts to No New York. Lindsay
 once described as James Brown trapped in Don Knotts'
body  pits scratch-slash-kill guitar against Robin
Crutchfield's sinister Suicidal electric piano and
contributes two vocals showing his unique (if
unintelligible) singing style in embryonic
form. On "Not Moving," Lindsay's playing approximates Syd
Barrett with an amphetamine edge.

The band matured on A Taste of DNA. Six pithy,
polished statements show Kabuki-painted drummer Ikue Mori
coming into her own as a tight, tireless master of shifting
asymmetrical rhythm; Lindsay drawls, yells, yelps, gulps,
burbles and gurgles his way to left-field legend. Replacing
Crutchfield's monolithic riffing is the sensitive,
painterly bass of Tim Wright. This is no formless anarchic
blare  each piece is a painstakingly crafted kernel
of ideas organized with fearless unorthodoxy.

The three live performances ("Taking Kid to
School," "Cop Buys a Donut," "Delivering the Goods") on
The Fruit of the Original Sin compilation are a poor
epitaph. They suffer from crummy sound quality  one
shifts from stereo to mono right in mid-song!  and
bizarre editing, though Wright's bass solo on "Delivering
the Goods" is typically exquisite.

For the last encore of its final performance, DNA did
Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love," fittingly capping an
iconoclastic career with the utterly unexpected. Released
more than 20 years later, DNA on DNA compiles the
band's studio oeuvre (the potently wound "You & You" 7-
inch, the occasionally less frenzied No New York
quartet, A Taste of DNA and an obscure leftover
called "Grapefruit") with previously unreleased live
recordings from 1978, 1980 and 1982. The 32 tracks are a
final statement that sound and feel, two decades after the
fact, more familiar, more bracingly unprecedented and
 face it  fun than ever.

Crutchfield formed Dark Day as a trio after his
departure from DNA; Exterminating Angel
uses machine-like keyboard riffs as the foundation for
moody,
Teutonic music. By the release of Dark Day, he had
jettisoned his backing band, shifting the music into the
twilight of ambient Eno or Dome. Never a complete original,
Crutchfield manages to get extra mileage out of the styles
he borrows.